by Scott Sacry
The Corvallis High School baseball team hosted Missoula Sentinel on Saturday, April 5 in their first home game of the season. It was also the first game to be played at the new baseball field at the Bitterroot Ball Park.
The Bitterroot Ball Park is a project spearheaded by the Corvallis Baseball and Softball Association (CBSA). The new baseball field is the first of five fields to be built in the evolving project that is located just east of the Corvallis soccer fields.
The completion of this field is the first major step in the process to complete the overall park. The Corvallis High School baseball team will use the field for home games this season.
The CBSA has been raising money toward completion of the park for six years and has raised close to a million dollars through various fundraising efforts. These efforts were bolstered by a $200,000 matching donation from Tim and Sarah Southwell, owners of ABC Farms in Hamilton. The Southwells were honored in the pregame ceremonies on Saturday.
The Southwell family, owner of ABC Farms in Hamilton, was honored for its $200,000 matching donation toward the new baseball field at the Bitterroot Ball Park. Photo by Hope Earp.
“This has been such a collaborative process with so many people and businesses stepping up to help, both financially and with their time,” said Chase Cooper, president of the Corvallis Baseball and Softball Association. “We have nine board members and tons of volunteers. It’s amazing to see it all come together.”
The main reason the group sought to build the park was to address the lack of field space for softball and baseball youth programs in Corvallis specifically, and in the Bitterroot Valley in general.
The CBSA, along with similar organizations in Stevensville, Hamilton, Victor and Darby, works under and with the Bitterroot Valley Baseball Association to manage youth baseball and softball in the valley. Corvallis alone has more than 250 kids on nine teams in their youth baseball and softball programs. Cooper estimates 1000 kids in the whole Bitterroot Valley will participate in youth baseball and softball programs this year.
The proposed plan for the Bitterroot Ball Park includes five total fields. The Corvallis high school baseball team played on the main baseball field on Saturday, April 5. Photo by Scott Sacry.
Needless to say, there are never enough fields for all the teams, and the creation of the Bitterroot Ball Park will help with alleviating this pressure for field space.
The main field where Saturday’s game was played was just the start of the proposed greater Bitterroot Ball Park (see photo). The final plan calls for five total fields. The CBSA leases the land from the Corvallis County Sewer District. The CBSA needed land for the fields and the Corvallis County Sewer District wanted this land put to good use, so it was a win-win scenario all around.
“My job is pretty easy,” said Cooper. “It’s all the other people who have done all the hard work. I’ll leave the site and come back and be like ‘wow, they finished this and finished that’. It’s a testament to what can be done when you get a group of people working on a common goal.”
On April 4, the Friday before the opening game, the community was busy preparing the field. Volunteers were putting the benches together, groups were hanging up sponsorship banners, and crews were tinkering with the pitcher’s mound to get it just right for the game.
“We haven’t cut any corners here,” said Cooper. “The field is top notch, the drainage system is state of the art, the infield dirt is a special kind from Idaho, the field is comparable to what you’d see at major league stadiums. There has been great momentum lately to get the field ready for this game.”
In the game on Saturday, Corvallis lost 0-4 to Missoula Sentinel. Corvallis struggled at the plate, only getting one hit against a solid Spartan pitching performance. For their part, Corvallis’s four pitchers (Branden Wiren, Adrian Sears, Adrian Cardullo, and Reese Earp) only allowed four hits and struck out 13 batters, but they gave up 4 runs.
Corvallis pitcher Adrian Cardullo pitches against Missoula Sentinel on Saturday, April 5 in Corvallis’s home opening game at their new field. Photo by Scott Sacry.
In a perfect world, the Blue Devils would have won the game to put a bow on the day. But in a larger sense, the win was the game itself, the win was the crowd gathered around the new field, the win was the community coming together for a common purpose.
For more information about the CBSA, see their facebook page or email them at cbsacorvallis@gmail.com.